The Happier Dead (10 page)

“I have. I have given it a great deal of thought.”

“And?”

“The classical gods weren’t really deities in the modern theological sense. They were neither omniscient nor omnipotent. They were really just people. People who had been doomed to live forever. I think they acted as they did because they were bored.”

T
HE GUEST ENTRANCE
to the dome was accessed through one of the shop fronts on the High Street, and Oates was shown to a storage locker where his clothes and personal effects were neatly arranged. Putting on his body armour, he felt time and identity return to him. The multiple layers of fantasy within Avalon had unsettled him. It had amplified in some way the conflict between his desire to see justice done, and his need to get back to his family. A trailing thread of his personality had snagged on the chain link fence of the spa on the way in, unravelling behind him as he walked the corridors of this wind-up toy of a world.

The setting that Nottingham had chosen for their fantasy retreat had not helped. Miranda was right to say that St Margaret’s was generic, but it had more of the flavour of a posh grammar or even a private school than a normal comp. It reminded Oates of reading
Brideshead Revisited
(there had been a limited number of books in his camp in Syria, and most of them belonged to the officers), and being disgusted by the author’s attempt to corner the market in halcyon youth, staking out the idealised territory of late adolescence like a private garden in a London square, giving the keys to the upper classes.

At least with a book you could banish the characters by throwing the thing across the room. The Great Spa was real. There was something obscene about this generation of the rich, clawing their way back into the womb, insulating themselves from the decade they had shaped with all its riots and decay. Eternally young, they could afford to wait for a better day.

He thought of Ali Farooz, and the hatred which had almost convinced Oates of his guilt. Looking back, he understood that the hatred had seemed authentic because it was. Oates could feel it himself – didn’t every mortal man, woman and child have a blood feud with the new-young, who would never die?

The Great Spa had overmastered him. He had wanted to be like a sheriff in an old Western, riding into town in his rusty Ford bearing justice for those who thought themselves beyond its reach. But Miranda had seen him coming a mile off, and in accommodating her requests and playing dress-up, Oates and his team had confirmed to her and to her clientele that the normal rules did not apply even as they sought to enforce them.

Outside the spa, with the cold caress of the armour on his trunk and the cigarette smell of his raincoat, he stood once again on solid ground. He knew that whatever unease St Margaret’s had raised in him, he must confront it before he returned. The resolution to the case lay within the walls of that artificial summer from sixty years ago. Yet inside it, he was vulnerable. Inside it, he was a stranger in someone else’s past.

Oates decided to take the seventies suit with him. He didn’t want the management to have any excuse for delaying entry on his return, and they could hardly say the clothes they had given him were not period appropriate. Plus it was a nice suit, and the only other one he had no longer buttoned at the waist. When they finally ushered him out the door and back into winter, the cold wind turned his head. Oates’s car had been driven around to the carpark outside the guest reception, and it stood among a gleaming host of Bentleys, Mercedes and customised Jeeps. Some of them were robocars, particularly the sports cars, but not all. A robocar would only look pricey to someone poor. If you were really rich, Treatment rich, you kept your steering wheel, and hired a man to turn it for you.

Seized once again by the odd adolescent defiance, he reversed into the car behind him, cracking the headlight. He pulled away as the car alarm lit up, delivering its shrill summons to the security guards through the double doors. As he headed down the motorway the great dome of the spa appeared once more in his rearview mirror, a souvenir snow globe with a thousand youthful memories shaken up inside, glittering with reflected light as they drifted down through the past, with a murder suspended at their heart.

09:45 HOURS

THURSDAY 21 NOVEMBER

2035 (REAL WORLD)

T
HE RADIO SAID
that there had been more disturbances in the small hours in London. There were bins and cars set alight in Tottenham, and groups of rioters had emptied some of the stores. A shop selling high-end trainers had been looted and fired on Camden High Street. The flames were still going in the morning. “I can’t leave you alone for five minutes,” Oates said to the city. He called Lori.

“Did the kids get off for school alright?”

“Fine. Mike’s a little rattled.”

“Yeah.”

“How’s the job? Will you be able to pick them up this evening?”

“We’ll see.”

“They’d like it if you picked them up.”

“I’d like to be able to do it.”

“What do you want for supper?”

“Oh, don’t worry about me.”

“It’s no bother, I’m going to the shops now.”

“I’ll probably just get something out.”

“It’s not good for you, you know. Eating all that junk.”

“I know.”

“Well, what time will you be back?”

It was amazing how they could both feel these confrontations coming. They neither of them wanted the conflict, but every step they tried to take to avoid it seemed to hasten the clash. He felt as if they were not two people in a conversation, but two drivers late at night who swerved to avoid one another in the same direction. He fought to hold on to kindness.

“I’ll be back when I’m back my love. As soon as I can.”

“Okay.”

“Okay then. I love you.”

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

“End call,” he said, but she was already gone from the line.

As he drove in the grey morning, Oates thought of a time just after he and Lori had moved in together. One of the things he loved about his wife; despite the fact she was neat as hospital corners to look at, she liked to eat her dinner in bed, and didn’t care if you got crumbs on the mattress or ketchup on the spread. He’d never been with a girl who would let you eat in bed.

Oates had bought a pallet of microwave lasagna from the cash and carry, and they lived off it for about a month. It was an Indian summer and they slept with the windows open and the street noise.

When October came they had to close the windows and the curtains for warmth. The first night with the sash up and the drapes closed she said she couldn’t sleep with the smell of lasagna hanging in the room. She had got up to take the two empty microwave dishes back to the kitchen, and Oates had leapt naked from the bed and blocked her way. He told her that he couldn’t let her take out the dishes, because if she got to cleaning up their bedroom she would eventually leave him. “I’m a slob and I can’t change! You have to stay a slob too,” he howled, and she was laughing so much she could barely hold the trays, and he chased her around the bed.

She leapt on the mattress and flanked him with a springy quickstep, landing lithe at the door. Before she made her escape she turned and grinned at him, and kicked up a naked heel. “If you change you’ll leave me,” he shouted breathless from the floor, and the neighbours banged on the adjoining wall and told them to shut up.

Coming back into London he noticed a curious thing. The traffic should have been flowing into the city, but the red taillights ahead of him were few and free moving. It was the other side of the road that was busy. People were leaving London. He passed one spot where the traffic had slowed to a halt on the other side of the crash barrier, and saw a kid with his duvet drawing finger faces in the condensation on the back passenger window. More than anything, Oates wanted to get back to his family. But the body of Prudence Egwu lay between them like a fallen tree across the road. There was no way round but to clear it.

F
ELIX
M
INOR WAS
bent. His conviction had left dirty fingerprints over every case he had ever handled. Minor had been caught out in a big purge of the Met following one of their periodic institutional scandals. This one concerned the distribution of goods at police auctions. Under pressure from the government to crack down on the assets of convicted criminals, the Met had increased the seizure and subsequent resale to the public of paintings, cars, boats, clothes, furniture and houses belonging to gang lords laid low. The officers in charge of such auctions could not bid for the items themselves, but they did administer the timing and advertisement of the sales.

It had become a perk of the job after resolving a big case to arrange an auction at very short notice and at an inaccessible venue, tipping off a few favoured dealers in advance. These stooges would scoop the loot for a song, and split the profits with the team of officers who had recovered it.

The arrangement had all the makings of a mass corruption, being a grey practice underpinned by a corresponding sense of entitlement. Such systems unravelled when the balance between greed and prudence shifted decisively to the former, and so it was when a journalist’s land registry search revealed that the multi-million pound house of a drug boss had been sold for the inexplicable sum of £100,000 to a property magnate with links to New Scotland Yard. The Met had appraised the officers involved with the dispassion of a surgeon observing a soldier’s poisoned limb, and Minor had found himself just below the amputation line.

The experience had embittered him, trapped as he was between the knowledge of his own guilt on the one hand, and the knowledge of everyone else’s on the other. He had deserved his punishment, but there were those above him who had deserved more, and who had been spared. Because of this, he was unable either to sustain himself with the knowledge of his innocence, or to embrace repentance, and the shrapnel from his crimes stayed buried in his bones, slowly poisoning the blood.

Oates felt the reflection of this paradox in himself – Minor had been his governor once or twice in his early days on the service, and he was no better or worse than most. He had liked the older man. Nevertheless, Oates felt a strong condemnatory reflex towards him now, precisely because his sin was one which Oates himself might have committed.

The things that happened to policemen in prison had happened to Minor, and now he haunted the pubs in Soho. He occupied a space between the forces of crime and the forces of the law, and belonging to neither he talked to both.

Oates left his many-miled Ford in police parking at St James’s and walked up towards Piccadilly Circus. Night and day haggled over central London long into the morning, and the city was still dimly lit beneath the pavement sky. As he came up Lower Regent Street he saw the statue of Anteros framed against the giant electronic billboards on the other side of the square.

It was his favourite statue in London. It had originally been built to commemorate the great philanthropist Lord Shaftsbury, and so the sculptor had chosen Anteros, the god of selfless love. But poor Anteros just didn’t have the brand recognition of his elder brother Eros, god of mad desire. They were twins and they looked identical, so people started calling the figure Eros. When the burghers of London found out that their stiff-collared Victorian hero was being commemorated by the naked boy-god of lust, they re-christened the statue again, calling it ‘The Angel of Christian Charity’. But you didn’t go to Soho for Christian charity, and Eros stuck. Wasn’t that London all over, mixing up love and lust, then getting embarrassed about the whole thing and trying to conceal it with some posh sounding name?

Even Eros was having a tough time of it these days; the god of desire was reduced to a tiny black silouette against the famous billboards on the other side of the circus. The face of the Nottingham Biosciences model, twenty foot wide from ear to ear, bulged in projected 3D from the surface of the largest hoarding. The flawless young girl mouthed their slogan, “
Don’t fear the reaper
”. Oates spat on the pavement and trudged on through the curtain of rain, the tourists and the cars and the buildings staying out of his way.

There were a couple of pubs Minor was known to frequent, and Oates had decided to begin by looking in at the Moor’s Head. It was open twenty-four hours, and was a good bet this early in the day. Away from the main tourist drag, the streets narrowed and cobbled up. The shops began to specialise, and to conceal rather than display their wares. In the cafés there were a few stragglers from the nightclubs, drinking coffee and resenting the day. The second hand book barrows on D’Arblay Street smelt sweetly of damp paper.

The vices of the whores and the dealer on the corner of St Peter’s Street seemed quaint beside the chain restaurants and clothes shops looming on Oxford Street, and the monstrous dome of the Great Spa out on the ringroad. Their sins were like the disobedience of children playing in a warzone. They had enough respect to stop hawking as Oates walked past in his uniform, and he nodded to them. The people in the Great Spa paid for their own security, but these people were under his protection or none. This was old London, hoarding itself against the future in the dank little alleys.

The Moor’s Head was dingier inside than the grey morning. Oates clocked three large men at the bar, their backs a wall of black leather. A tramp sat beside the door, nursing the half of bitter that stood between him and the cold outside. The pub had a wooden partition to separate the saloon bar from the back of the house. He knew better than to ask after Minor, and went round to look for himself. The door in the partition was set low, and Oates had to stoop. Minor sat at a wooden table beside a lead-latticed window in the snug. The diamond-shaped panes of glass were old enough to be thick at the bottom, and steamed by the radiator beneath the windowsill. On the sill itself there was a sheaf of flyers for West End shows, strip clubs and warehouse parties, all of them long passed. From somewhere round the corner came the sound of a quizz machine gobbling change.